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Numinous and Concrete

The Material Is Spiritual

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I listen to the rain and crows outside my window and feel thankful. Thankful as I always am not only to have a home and employment, but thankful also for all of the people gathering in the rain by choice. There are many who are out in the rain not by choice, year after year after year. Some of us try to offer them food, or safe haven, but it is not enough. The cultures we make together have too many bricks fired with greed and inequality. It is time now, to rebuild.

These are times of bright lights and large shadows. Brightness and shadow are in each of us, and in the cultures we create. It is up to us to notice when things have become out of balance, and try to redress. This isn't, for me, about force fighting force; this is, for me, about reaching out to join hands in the realization that we have been separated for far too long. It is time to come together and create something new. We must stand for something. We must stand for what we love.

Years ago, as a young anarcho-feminist, I took a job on the Pacific Stock Options Exchange in order to try to accomplish two things: I would pay my rent while getting an education in how the U.S. economic system worked. See, I dropped out of high school to go to college, and then dropped out of college because it was too great a struggle to work full time, study, pay my bills, and pay for school, when I wasn't sure what getting a degree was useful for. As a working class/working poor kid, I had no knowledge of the ins and outs of student loans, nor did my family have the funds or knowledge to help me. So I decided, as usual, to educate myself. I have a long history of being an autodidact. Working in the "belly of the Beast" as some might say, I would hopefully learn about a system I thought I hated, while buying the food I needed to survive.

On the Options floor, I saw people who were scared, people who were angry, and people who were kind. I coined a phrase to express the dichotomy I felt: "He's a nice guy, but he's an asshole." I figured out that no money in our system was clean, that the bike messengers outside still delivered packages to Shell Oil, and that our economic system was rooted in gambling. Huh. I never knew before then that my father, who struggle with addiction his whole life—first alcohol and then gambling until his life's end—was part of a larger system of economic theory. Too bad it never helped him. My carpenter father wasn't a high stakes player like the traders I worked with. The traders I worked with, however, were mixed bags, just like my father. Just like me.

I recall one man who treated me really well, recognizing my intelligence and liking my blue, flattop mohawk and motorcycle boots, and whose face grew purple with frustration when I refused to buy South African Krugerrands in the mid-1980s pre-crash environment. Word spread like wildfire around the trading floor and the one African American trader came up to shake my hand and thank me. On another day one trader quite proudly stated to me, "Commerce should be free of politics" when I, 19-year-old that I was, knew that was impossible and argued so. Commerce and politics were inextricably linked, but we humans, in our quest for clean compartmentalization, tried to pretend it was not so.